Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Save your local library

Increasingly, this is an age of revolution. Disaffection has even reached England’s green and apathetic land. Libraries are to close and campaign groups have formed online around books blogs and community forums. Slogans are shouted, ministers harangued and the Culture Select Committee petitioned – all to no immediate avail. The dissenters are not above direct action, albeit confined to the sleepily donnish variety of protest. A wave of sit-ins, or read-ins as they are termed, was coordinated last Saturday and I went to watch the tenor of these demonstrations. First impressions of New Cross Library are thwarted by the pervasive must. The air is coarse: dehydrated by the aggressive central

Isabel Sutton

English is passed from coloniser to colony

Secondary school pupils aren’t taking modern languages.  I can’t claim to be surprised at this news: in 2004 the Labour government made it non-compulsory to learn a foreign language after the age of 14 and the invitation to dump vocabulary tests and listening exercises has been gratefully received.  What an error.  Having carelessly dropped Spanish, German and finally French when I was at school, I am now enrolled on not one, not two, but three evening courses.  The most exciting is Thursday night: Hindi Stage 1. The Statesman is Kolkata’s most venerable English language newspaper, read throughout West Bengal and beyond.  It is my memory of working in its dilapidated

Monday

Matthew Richardson

Three4Two Faulks on fiction: the SCR will hate it

After several breathless promo ads, Faulks on Fiction finally got under way this weekend. The four-part series aims (as Faulks explains during a fetching walk-and-talk shot on the Millennium Bridge) to weaken the mystique of authors; Faulks’ emphasis is on characters. The first programme occupied itself with ‘the hero’ in English fiction, or, more accurately, narrated the decline of swashbuckling brawn from Robinson Crusoe to John Self. With the rise of postmodernism, so the argument goes, the literary hero breathed his last. Inevitably, Faulks has to paint with a pre-school sized brush. The seven heroes he selects – Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, Becky Sharpe, Sherlock Holmes, Winston Smith, Jim Dixon

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 7 February 2011

Edna O’Brien at 80. The grand dame of Irish fiction talks to the Observer about religion, hedonism and conscience. “Someone said to me in Dublin: masses are down, confessions are down, but funerals are up! Religion. You see, I rebelled against the coercive and stifling religion into which I was born and bred. It was very frightening, and all pervasive. I’m glad it has gone. But when you remove spirituality, or the quest for it, from people’s lives, you remove something very precious. Ireland is more secular, but it went to their heads: a kind of hedonism. They’re free, yes, but questions come with freedom. What about conscience? Conscience is

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Great Dictator

From Sebastian Faulks’s reflections on Jeeves: It is the exact balance of the sweetness of revenge for Jeeves and the vast relief that Bertie feels that makes the endings of the novels so satisfactory. The point is that this happy world must not change. Bachelorhood for Bertie is the deal-breaker for Jeeves, but there are other elements of Jeeves’s enchanted world that he must fight to preserve. There are rules; they may seem trivial, but not to him: someone must ensure that it all remains the same, and the task falls to Jeeves. A gentleman’s trouser bottoms should “shimmer, not break” on the instep of his shoe, according to Jeeves.

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

BOOKENDS: Hang the participle

An awful lot of books are being published these days about the English language. David Crystal has a new one out every few weeks, and John Sutherland probably has half a dozen on the go. The Language Wars: (John Murray, £17.99) is Henry Hitchings’s third and unlikely to be his last. An awful lot of books are being published these days about the English language. David Crystal has a new one out every few weeks, and John Sutherland probably has half a dozen on the go. The Language Wars: (John Murray, £17.99) is Henry Hitchings’s third and unlikely to be his last. Previous books have been described as ‘chewy and

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Names to conjure with

Golly gee. Academic literary critics are going to hate Faulks on Fiction like sin. Here is Sebastian three-for-two Faulks, if you please, clumping onto their turf with a book of reflections on a couple of dozen great novels. And he declares in his introduction, with some pride, that he intends to take ‘an unfashionable approach’ and examine characters in these books ‘as though they were real people’. And he then divides them into four character types — Heroes, Lovers, Snobs and Villains — without so much as footnoting a structuralist ethnographer, instead declaring ex cathedra that these are ‘the four character types that British novelists have returned to most often’.

A.N. Wilson

Perchance to dream

This book reads like an interesting after- dinner conversation between intelligent friends. That said, it is a rambling conversation, and although it is extremely entertaining, it does not add up to much. Its ostensible subjects are two instances of scientific intelligence being brought to bear on the possibility of defying, or surviving, death. In the first case, John Gray investigates those, such as Freddie Myers and Henry Sidgwick, who formed the Society for Psychical Research. In the second instance, Gray tells again the bizarre story of the cult of Lenin, and Leonid Krasin’s belief that, if Lenin’s body could be kept in a state of cryonic suspension, there might dawn

David Crane

Consummate con artist

‘Taylor, I dreamt of your lecture last night,’ the polar explorer Captain Scott was once heard to exclaim, after sitting through a paper on icebergs by the expedition physiographer, Griffith Taylor, that had reduced even its author to the edge of catalepsy: ‘How could I live so long in the world and not know something of so fascinating a subject!’ The True Story of Titanic Thompson is not going to be everyone’s book, but for those who can get beyond the child-brides and casual killings, Kevin Cook’s biography of a great American hustler might well provoke the same sense of wonderment. ‘Taylor, I dreamt of your lecture last night,’ the

Jervoise Andreyev

Care or cure?

Cancer is usually associated with death. For the cancer specialist, however, cancer is more about life: not just patients’ lives; the cancer itself often lives the life of Riley. If it has a life, then, it is entitled to a biography. Here, Siddhartha Mukherjee, an obviously compassionate oncologist, provides that biography. The basis of any biography is the story. In this book, there are four interwoven stories; that of people with cancer, full of fear, but increasingly often, surviving; that of scientists and doctors: stories of genius, perseverance, integrity, serendipity but also arrogance and fraud; the statistical story which tells us that the global burden of cancer doubled (thank you

James Walton

Morphine memories

Chapman’s Odyssey became quite famous before it was published, largely because it nearly wasn’t. Chapman’s Odyssey became quite famous before it was published, largely because it nearly wasn’t. Paul Bailey’s long and distinguished career, complete with two appearances on the Booker shortlist, apparently counted for nothing last year when he was reduced to what he called the ‘sheer hell’ of touting the book unavailingly round town, while living off grants from the Royal Literary Fund. Yet, sad though this undoubtedly was, when Bloomsbury finally rode to his rescue, one heretical thought was hard to suppress. Could it be that the novel had struggled to find a home not because of

Lewis Jones

And then there was one . . .

The English fascination with spies is gloriously reflected in our literature, from Kim to A Question of Attribution, and while their Egyptian and Israeli counterparts remain untranslated, and the Americans unreadable, English spy novelists rule. Compromised, divided and alienated, the spy is a model modern hero, and the spy’s world, with its furtive and fetishistic arcana, is an admirable theatre of identity, of English attitudes to sex and class, hypocrisy and betrayal. (The best recent spy novel is John Banville’s The Untouchable, which tells the story of Anthony Blunt more freely than Alan Bennett’s play, nudging the facts into outrageous fiction — casting Graham Greene as the villain, for example.)

Byron Rogers

Nowhere becomes somewhere

There have been quite a few anthologies of British eccentricity. Usually they are roll-calls of the lunatic: a sought-after heiress so snobbish she finally gave her hand in marriage to a man who had managed to convince her he was the Emperor of China; a miser so mean he would sit on fish until he considered them cooked; a man so addicted to cobnuts he would, after any long coach journey, be up to his knees in their shells. Men who refused to get into a bath, others who refused to get out of one, or were so quarrelsome they could spot an insult at 100 yards, others who so

Ian Thomson

A war of nutrition

The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of the Nazi assault on Poland on 1 September and the ensuing Phoney War — gave little hint of the storm to come. The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of the Nazi assault on Poland on 1 September and the ensuing Phoney War — gave little hint of the storm to come. As German troops engulfed Poland, however, the Nazi science of massacre was put to the test. Within two months of Hitler’s invasion, an estimated 5,000 Jews

Friday

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Hang the participle

Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is as an exclusive for the books blog. An awful lot of books are being published these days about the English language. David Crystal has a new one out every few weeks, and John Sutherland probably has half a dozen on the go. The Language Wars is Henry Hitchings’s third and unlikely to be his last. Previous books have been described as ‘chewy and edible’ and ‘a goldmine of pleasures’, which leads you to expect something discursive, entertaining and not particularly substantial, but Hitchings (in real life the Evening Standard’s drama critic) has a

David Blackburn

Dirty ditties

Claudine Van Hensbergen, an Oxford Don, has disinterred some early Georgian smut from a 1714 edition of The Works of the Earls of Rochester and Roscommon. The poems, found in a sub-section titled ‘The Cabinet of Love’, were added by the publisher, Edmund Curll, and are definitely not by John Wilmot, although I imagine he would have cackled along to the bawdy rhymes. Van Hensbergen told the Times (£): “To my surprise, The Cabinet turned out to be a collection of pornographic verse about dildos. The poems include Dildoides, a poem attributed to Samuel Batler about the public burning of French-imported dildos, The Delights of Venus, a poem in which

Thursday

Anna Baddeley

The critic is dead, long live the critic

If the Observer was hoping to reignite the debate on the future of cultural criticism they couldn’t have found a soggier squib than American academic Neal Gabler’s unenlightening essay. Professional criticism, thinks Gabler, is dead. According to him, reviewers, or “cultural commissars”, used to be able to control what we “ordinary folk” read, watched and listened to “through a process close to cultural brainwashing”. Now we ignore them, consulting blogs and Twitter instead. Gabler sees this as a revolution against cultural elitism. Several things annoy me about his doomladen, US-centric prognosis: 1. The conflation of the death of criticism with the death of cultural elitism If professional criticism is in

David Blackburn

Discovering poetry – bloody men and Wendy Cope

Wendy Cope is a household name, a force in light but cutting verse to match Betjeman and Larkin. So it’s somewhat surprising that she has produced so little since in a career spanning 30 years. Anyway, I wish she’d write more because few things give such simple and sustained pleasure as her rueful stanzas: Bloody Christmas, here again, Let us raise a loving cup, Peace on earth, goodwill to men, And make them do the washing up.                   Or curt two-liners: 1. Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter. 2. The easy way: get to know him better. Her poetry has an understated wit and barely worn insight,

Wednesday

Matthew Richardson

The trials and tribulations of being anonymous

Being anonymous doesn’t immunize you from criticism, as the nameless author of O: A Presidential Novel has discovered recently. Numerous high profile reviewers have been sharpening their critical cutlery and tucking in.   Simon Schama, usually the model of bouncy good humour, was brought to a savage, Swiftian boil by ‘this turkey’ in the Financial Times over the weekend. And his guess at the reason for anonymity is amusing, if not a little cruel: ‘…if you’d committed something as dull as this you’d want to make sure no one found out either.’ A definite thumbs-down.   Justin Webb, in the Times, is a touch kinder. The book might read as

David Blackburn

The genius of Raymond Chandler

‘I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.’ Philip Marlowe had it lucky: I haven’t even got a hat. This month, Radio Four will air four plays of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Adapted by script writers Stephen Wyatt and Robin Brooks and starring Toby Stephens as Chandler’s infamous detective, the Classic Chandler season begins at 2:30 this Saturday with The Big Sleep. Make it your business to listen. Somewhere between the fish course and the appreciation of Islamophobia, dinner party guests discuss how Chandler revolutionised the